Sustainable Buildings Demand Cleaner Water

The quality of New York City water has long been of, well, consuming interest. Lately, however, trendsetting developers like Douglaston Development, the Durst Organization, Extell Development, Rockrose, Rose Associates and Silverstein Properties have taken matters into their own hands by specifying central water filtration systems for their new buildings here. Some builders are going even further by equipping kitchens with high-end filters to obviate the need for bottled water. The Helena, a 600-unit, LEED gold-certified Midtown residential property built by Durst and managed by Rose Associates, was the first local project to feature twice-filtered water. If this trend takes off, it will certainly have positive environmental implications.

According to the Container Recycling Institute, more than 60 million plastic bottles are discarded every day—and that's just in America. Demand for bottled water has grown so rapidly that even the best efforts at recycling cannot keep up. A dozen years ago, two out of five bottles were recycled; by 2005, the number had fallen to one out of six. When you think about the environmental impact of manufacturing and distributing bottled water in the first place—every bottle sold in Manhattan must be trucked in—the case for water filtration becomes crystal clear.

If you asked most New Yorkers 20 years ago, water was simply water. But the city's demographics and the prevailing mindset of its residents have changed dramatically. Today, the average resident cares deeply about quality-of-life and environmental issues, and water is increasingly high on the list of such concerns. Not too long ago developers told me that they thought installing a filtering system implied something was wrong with the water. Few people think that way any longer. Filtration is now properly seen as an enhancement, not a corrective. People have become comfortable with multiple grades of water quality, applied to different purposes. There doesn't need to be one universal standard of water for everything from drinking to flushing a toilet.

New York City water is unusually soft and low in total dissolved solids—good news, because improving it does not require complicated, expensive technologies like reverse osmosis. Less desirably, it's loaded close to the EPA maximum with fine particulates. As a result of its origin in clay-bottom reservoirs, it contains not just the inevitable chlorine but its byproduct THMs (trihalomethanes) as well as, periodically, parasites like Cryptosporidium.

Knowing the specific characteristics of our water and the fact that less than 2% of what is pumped into buildings is actually consumed, we recommend two stages of filtration for New York property owners. The first is particle filtration of all water used by the building—except the fire reserve—at the main. The water therefore runs crystal clear and largely free of oxidized iron and manganese, which stain fixtures and cause rust buildup. Secondly, we recommend a bottled-quality system in every kitchen cabinet dedicated to drinking water and food-prep.

Not all filters are alike. When we started Better Waters in the early '90s, we decided we'd always keep an eye out for the "better mousetrap." High-flow systems have traditionally relied on huge tanks, which are difficult to get through the door and situate in a basement, but new technologies like Amiad dispense with tanks, using no filtration media at all. Particles are collected against a cylindrical stainless steel screen and flushed out several times a day.

The system saves in real estate value alone far more than it costs, and uses less than one-tenth the water consumed by other filtration systems for self-maintenance. That can mean a savings of over one million gallons per year.

Only a handful of systems offer the purity of a quality bottled water, and size matters. For a filter to really pull out contaminants from water, there must be contact time between the filtration media and the water that passes through it.

Little filters commonly included with refrigerators are mostly cosmetic. They might improve taste by reducing chlorine, but people drink bottled water not just for taste, but purity as well. The good news is that, once contaminants really are stripped away, New York City water really does rank with the best waters anywhere.